Saturday, March 4, 2017

Office 365 adoption spreadsheet

One of the challenges with Office 365 is that it needs to be seen as a platform rather than a single product.

Unsurprisingly, the most common service implemented in Office 365 is email. This is mostly because people don’t know what else their suite contains.

It is therefore important, for many reasons, that IT reseller enable every service in Office 365 that customers have access to do. At ther very least, they should be ensuring customer know about everything that is available to them. Unfortunately, I don’t see that being done well. The main reason for that is simply most resellers don’t have a system to help drive adoption. Hopefully, my spreadsheet above, that you can download and use for yourself, might help a bit.

What I have done is created a new tab for each Office 365 service. So for example, there is an E5 tab that lists all the customers in order and then has columns for each of the items in that service. For example in E5 there is Meeting Broadcast, Cloud PBX, Delve Analytics, Power BI Pro, Customer Lockbox and so on. Then there is a tab for Email, Delve, Yammer, Team Sites, etc.

The idea is that for each service you go in and enter a usage number as a percentage. This represents how much of that feature the client knows about and is using. Where do the actual percentage figures come from? In the spreadsheet I have created they are entered manually, however there is nothing stopping you getting them from the Office 365 utilisation stats in the Admin Console or even the Power BI Office 365 adoption content pack. I’d suggest that the idea is to keep things as simple as possible to start with and improve it from there.

Now that there are figures for all the individual items, these are then rolled up into a Summary tab at the front of the spreadsheet. I have also used conditional formatting to highlight those which are below an acceptable level. This allows you, at a glance, to see where you need to placing your energy to lift usage within your customer base.

By converting the lists of items to a table I can now sort by any column I choose. Thus, if I sort the Total column from top to bottom I can see my best and worst users over all. I can repeat that process for any column as well to see which users have the overall worst take up of something like Yammer say.

I can therefore look at the spreadsheet by row, i.e. per customer, to identify what services any individual business is not using. However, I can also look at the results by column, i.e. by service. That would allow me to focus say on Yammer and target the lowest adoption, then move to the next lowest adoption. I could look across all my columns and run a campaign to target the lowest service usage.

Even though the spreadsheet is pretty basic, the concept is rather powerful I reckon. It allows to more easily target those customers with low adoption of Office 365 products. It also allows a IT resellers to start setting goals like – ‘Our aim for this month is to get average Yammer user above 50% for all our customers’. It provides sales and business development types an easy way to target the biggest opportunities in their customer base. And so on, and so on. There are lots of ways that you can use the information that this spreadsheet provides.

Of course, you can take my concept and extend it any way you desire. You can of course simplify it to start out. Use it anyway you want to help your business drive more Office 365 adoption. The important thing is that it gives you a system that you can work to, automate, outsource, delegate, etc. Systems are for winners, so take what I have done, modify it for yourself and go out there and win!